Krista Collier-Jarvis Graduate student, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Mom worked hard, supported me, took good care of me, really pushed me to be what I wanted to be. I grew up in Truro on the edge of the Millbrook reserve. Just me and my mom. It was hard. I grew up in a trailer park. I think I’m only the second person in my family to do post-secondary school. Mom worked hard, supported me, took good care of me, really pushed me to be what I wanted to be with no additional voice of ‘No, that’s not possible for you or maybe you should look into this.' It was all about self-discovery. She’d let me discover what I needed to do. I’m part Mi’kmaq, which I did not know until I was 21. It’s something my mom never told me. The person on my birth certificate is not my biological father, but then he left anyway when I was nine. So it was just me and her. I don’t know what happened in her relationship that led to that, but she is a great single mom and worked hard at everything. My biological father, who I never met, passed away in 2017. That was my choice not to meet him. No regrets there. I met some of my family. He’s got other children, and I’ve met his sister, who is technically my biological aunt. From there, I think what that has done for me is that I increasingly have this desire to learn more about my Indigenous past and heritage and culture. It’s grown over the years and now my research is intersecting with that. I’m working on developing a theory of Indigenous Gothic to talk about how monsters can work as agents of decolonization. I don’t know if they can yet, but I think they can. When you come into American Gothic, you’re influenced by this colonial narrative that affected everything. Monsters go from an external space like the vampires and Dr. Jekyll to an internal space. The monster is us. Which is why zombies are so interesting because in a lot of those narratives we are already infected. Like The Walking Dead. It’s already in us, we just have to die for it to be in effect. We’re already monsters, something just has to bring it out. I was very much an outdoor kid. In that small trailer park neighbourhood, nobody can afford video games. None of us had video game systems or fancy cable or anything, so we all played outside. We built forts in the woods and roamed around. Just those tiny little forests, those little groves of trees that feel so huge as a kid. You can roam through them for hours. Art class changed me a lot in high school. I wasn’t going to take art when I went to high school, but you had to pick some sort of creative channel. I did art a lot as a kid but then didn’t touch it in junior high. Mr. Brown was the art teacher. I took him all throughout high school. He just really fostered my creative juices and how to work with them. I just photographed a really impromptu one of a kind wedding a couple of weeks ago at this studio that I teach at because I teach pole fitness. She’s an aerialist. She's low key and relaxed and said, 'Yeah, so me and my boyfriend decided we are going to get married at the studio this weekend. Do you want to photograph it?' I said, 'That’s freakin’ cool, who gets to do that?' So in my head, I already had this beautiful vision when she asked me of how to capture that. I get to make the art because I chose to make the art. For the ceremony, we took the aerial silks and we connected them and draped them in beautiful ways. That was the background for her ceremony. I took her and her husband over to the pole side and we did some pole doubles moves. (Pole photographs of Krista taken at inesS studio in downtown Halifax.) ← Jay ↑ Home Hemant →
